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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25240510">Senseless</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Ash/pseuds/Miss_Ash'>Miss_Ash</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, F/M, but the MCD only stands if you read this as a standalone, for once I have already fixed my own angst</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:07:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,382</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25240510</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Ash/pseuds/Miss_Ash</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The telegram comes on a Tuesday; pink, pristine, and plainly worded. </p>
<p> <i>We deeply regret to inform you...</i></p>
<p>A prequel to my drabble, 'Ghost'</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Phryne Fisher/Jack Robinson</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>76</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Senseless</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">


        <li>
            Inspired by

            <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23715988">the many meanings of closeness</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Ash/pseuds/Miss_Ash">Miss_Ash</a>.
        </li>

    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hello hello. This is just a little prequel ficlet to 'Ghost' from my 'many meanings of closeness' collection. Without that this is some <i>major</i> angst, so bewarned. However 'tis a prequel for a reason, so despite this being sad as a standalone, the overall story is meant to end rather happier than this and does if you read the drabble. </p>
<p>Anyway, I wanted to explore grief on a sensory level, and this is how it came out. I can but apologise.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The telegram comes on a Tuesday; pink, pristine, and plainly worded. </p>
<p><em> We deeply regret to inform you </em>...</p>
<p>And it isn’t that she doesn’t know to expect it; his extended silence has spoken volumes, ground each of them into dirt with the weight of dwindling hope at its loudness. Yet she has been holding some, nonetheless, cradled in the most secure chamber of her heart where parting from it would have felt like parting from who she has always prided herself on being. </p>
<p>They both deserve her hope. </p>
<p>Then comes the telegram – and she finds it cruel in its own indecisiveness. It tells her nothing, really, that she had not already feared, had not already known, in each weary fibre of herself save that final, holy sanctum. </p>
<p>
  <em> Cptn Jack Robinson… missing in action, presumed killed.  </em>
</p>
<p>It just confirms, in phlegmatic black typeface, that hope is truly all she has left. </p>
<p>.</p>
<p>Most of what she notices of the follow up letter – when someone stumbles upon the wreckage with no appreciation for how they wreck her heart in the process – is the quality of the paper. It sits, smooth and weighted, between her trembling fingers, the embossed lines of the swirling letterhead providing her an odd distraction from the words delivered with them. </p>
<p>She isn’t aware she’s fallen to her knees until the hand that isn’t still gripping the letter touches the cool tile of the floor, nails grating across it and finding no purchase, no relief. </p>
<p><em> Dear Mrs. Robinson, </em> it starts, though she has never been Mrs. Robinson and doesn’t know where on earth they got the idea that she is. She hates the address because it isn’t, wasn’t, never would have been, but most especially because it never <em> can </em> be now, regardless of whether she wants it or not. </p>
<p>The content prattles through niceties and condolences yet none of them soften the blow of the hateful truth that it holds. </p>
<p>
  <em> Confirmed deceased.  </em>
</p>
<p>“It’s nice paper,” she whispers to Dot when she finds her, pries her gently from the cold floor. It’s only when Dot removes it from her fingers that she realises she’s scrunched it up, and the cream is blemished with tiny smears of red where she’s given herself paper cuts. </p>
<p>She finds it absently amusing that she doesn’t feel them. Dot walks her upstairs, runs her a bath, slowly helps her undress and slide beneath the hot water.</p>
<p>She feels none of it – only the stabbing in her chest where that final stronghold of hope had lain, walls shattered, treasure plundered. </p>
<p>.</p>
<p>She had screamed, the first night Janey was gone. Run into the woods and howled her guilt and grief in primal cries until she had expelled it from her lungs. She had sobbed when they’d found her body, too, heaving breaths that echoed in the clearing and quieted only slowly beneath the soothing stroke of Jack’s fingers. </p>
<p>This grief is strangely silent; it strikes her dumb and the world seems to fall mute with her. The noises of existence fade away, overtaken by the simple quiet of his absence from it. </p>
<p>The orchestra continues to play in the background – but the lead chair is missing, and without him the melody becomes nonsense. It annoys her most because she has, in so many ways, cast herself as conductor, and the baton remains glued to her hand despite her more self-indulgent wishes to drop it. </p>
<p>She continues to work, meeting Hugh’s consistently concerned gazes at crime scenes with her head high, pretending that she can hear him through the deafening hush, pretending that she cares. </p>
<p>Even when she lies awake at night, staring at his pillow, at the physical representation of the empty space he has left behind him – in her bed, her heart, her life – the tears that spill from her are silent. </p>
<p>She hasn’t the energy for howling, anymore.</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>It’s the scent of biscuits that finally breaks the odd calm of her grief, hitting her like a damn brick wall as she wanders into the kitchen in search of something she instantly forgets when she smells it. </p>
<p>It’s the sweet, homely aroma of a peace she’d never imagined herself having and a love she’d never imagined herself enjoying and a life she instantly hates herself for ever, <em> ever </em> indulging in. </p>
<p>She screams at Mr. Butler for the first time in his long employment, collapses into a chair and sobs into her hands at the kitchen table; the first time she has allowed herself to mourn so openly in front of another. </p>
<p>He makes a pan of cocoa and sits with her, tells her about his wife, and she lets the warm smell of chocolate wash over her, soothe her, bathing in both it and his assurances it will get better. </p>
<p>“Did you ever think about remarrying?” she asks, because she never has, and she wonders now if that hasn’t been terribly remiss of her when she has known him so long. </p>
<p>“I never met anyone who made me want to,” he replies, voice measured. “It’s a good thing to move on, not to get so lost in grief you lose yourself, but some people just… aren’t replaceable.”</p>
<p>That, she understands. She’s lost two of them, now. </p>
<p>“Do you still miss her?” She knows what the answer will be the same way she knows her heart hurts when she sees sisters playing together in the street. </p>
<p>“Every day,” he confirms. “But I find the best thing to do is learn to enjoy the reminders of them. Let the memories be something joyful, rather than a source of pain.”</p>
<p>Two weeks later she walks into the kitchen and stops, confronted by the familiar scent once more. Mr. Butler looks up from where he’s pulling the baking tray from the oven, expression slightly unsure. </p>
<p>She takes a deep lungful of air, drowns herself momentarily in the scent, in the memories it evokes, then wipes the tears it springs away and crosses the kitchen to hug him. </p>
<p>.</p>
<p>The whiskey sits on her tongue, burns its way down her throat, a caustic whisper that almost chokes her as she holds the cut glass in deceptively steady fingers. </p>
<p>She will not allow them to shake today, no matter how much they might want to. </p>
<p>She takes another sip, the biting warmth of the liquor comforting despite the way its flavour stirs memories she still does not want to truly confront. The problem is that whiskey no longer tastes just like whiskey to her. </p>
<p>It tastes like him. </p>
<p>There is an irrevocable association in her mind between the smokey bitterness of the alcohol and the sweetness of his mouth, the salt of his skin beneath her lips. </p>
<p>This is whiskey they drank together, long years ago when they had been deluded with their own happiness. Funny, how in their joy they never thought to remove each other from the taste of it, never thought to keep it divorced from the taste of each other lest the damn drink ferment itself to pain in future memories. </p>
<p>She sets the glass to one side and picks up her lipstick, painting on her smile of mourning before placing it back and taking stock of herself. </p>
<p>Black has always been a colour she likes, striking as it is against her paleness and useful as it is for sleuthing, but staring at herself dressed head to toe in it now – a sartorial echo of the hole she feels aching in her chest – she cannot help but hate it on her. </p>
<p>She has never, not in her wildest dreams (or nightmares, for that matter) pictured herself a widow. Technically, she still isn’t, but she cannot help acknowledge that she looks the part. If anything, she hates this most.  </p>
<p>She is numb, has been in so many ways since that first pink slip of paper, and yet her senses feel alight with the horrible truth that today will memorialise. </p>
<p>The glass stares at her from her dresser and she picks it up again to drain the remaining liquid, staunchly refusing to let it taste like grief this time. With a heavy sigh and the taste of whiskey, the memory of Jack, heavy on her tongue, she makes her way down the stairs to finally face the senselessness of loss. </p>
<p>And then comes the knock. </p>
<p> </p>
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